Time

 

Time is moving on, I thought aloud, as we drove up Heidelberg Road in peak hour to where the road bifurcates at the railway bridge in Ivanhoe. Or perhaps time is moving around. Sometimes I don’t understand time at all, said Carol, the driver, timing nicely her shift into the turning lane before arriving behind bumper-to-bumper all the way to Waterdale Road. I work all week and never get any time to work in the garden, she argued, implying I had all the time in the world to do gardening. I work in my sleep, I replied, upping my contribution towards the working week to 24/7, and do I get paid for all that work? Not likely, I reflected, haughtily. Carol, who works while she eats, she said, was of the view that she did much more real work than me and where did all that time go? The concept that time goes somewhere was left in the air as we motored along Upper Heidelberg Road over Eaglemont, the long and winding road that leads to our door. I hummed a famous line before claiming that I had been experimenting with the space-time continuum and now worked over 26 hours per day of Einsteinian time. The green bins are out tonight, said Carol, changing the subject and not for the first time. Perhaps they should be called space-time continuums, I pondered aloud, they look a bit like daleks. Sometimes I just don’t understand time at all, exclaimed Carol, what exactly is it doing, anything? Yes, I said, I agree, our memory tells us about these places and what they were then, but really it’s all one inside. Sometimes we just have to go with the flow because we’re not going to explain time just by talking. Carol turned the car right off Waiora Road where the magnificent vista of the complete Dandenongs veers into view, as it has done for the time of the Dreaming. It’s true though, I said as we coursed curvaceously down Ruthven Street into the Macleod valley, that we have organised time so it controls everything we think and do. This is wrong and a strong argument, I suggested, for prayer, and music, and contemplation. The only level crossing not danandrewsed came into sight as the phone rang a distinctive person’s tone, bringing these thoughts on business time to an abrupt cessation. True, it was not your usual conversation about raking the leaves and why is there so much leaf slush on the paths and who is going to put out the green bin anyway, as if that was not already a foregone conclusion when someone has 26 hours in the day in which to do it all, unpaid. Ringing off, soon Carol had moved on to the subject of bifurcation, one meaning of which is what Heidelberg Road does at Ivanhoe, but a second meaning is the possibility of a person being in two places at once. I thought, I don’t mind where Carol is, as long as she’s behind the wheel of the car when it’s moving and I’m in the passenger seat. It was nightfall as we careened up Torbay Street.